In the United Stated (U.S.), more than 90% of budding space cooling and refrigeration is provided by vapor compression (VC) based systems. Modern compressors are highly efficient, but are now approaching their theoretical and technological limits. In addition to the efficiency plateau, VC technology has environmental issues. For example, VC refrigerants such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFC) or halofluorocarbons (HFC) are a significant source of green house gas (GHG) emissions. Global warming potential (GWP) for VC refrigerants is as high as 1000 times that of CO2. According to 2008 Buildings Energy Data, with VC as the dominate technology, building space cooling and refrigeration will consume 7.46 quads of primary electricity and generate 447 million metric tons (MMT) of CO2 emissions by the year 2030. This will be equivalent to ˜5% of primary energy consumption and ˜5% of CO2 emissions in the U.S. alone. As such, there is an urgent need to develop new and affordable cooling technologies to enhance overall energy efficiencies and reduces GHG emissions. A number of alternative technologies are under development including electrocaloric, magnetocaloric, thermoacoustic, and thermoelectric. Magnetocaloric cooling (MC) is currently considered a front runner among these technologies due to its higher efficiency and elimination of HCFC/HFC refrigerants. However, MC is inherently expensive because of the requirement for large magnetic fields and rare earth materials. Recently, an entirely new type of solid-state cooling based on reversible martensitic transformation was disclosed by a group of researchers at the University of Maryland. The new cooling technology is referred to as “elastocaloric cooling” (EC) which utilizes super-elastic transformation of austenite. Compared to other cooling technologies, EC has three advantages: 1) It is environment friendly. EC uses solid refrigerants, which completely eliminates the need for HCFC/HFC refrigerants, 2) EC has a high efficiency. It has been shown that the COP (coefficient of performance) of a jugular refrigerant is 5.8 with a ΔT of about 12° C., and 3) EC is cost-effective. EC does not require hydrostatic pressure. Therefore, there is no need for hermetic seals. In addition, the working materials are inexpensive. These advantages positioned EC to challenge VC as a dominate cooling technology. EC technology is new. And, key characteristics of the technology have yet to be fully understood, but differences associated with the physics from other cooling technologies are obvious. These differences enable different applications and different system designs. The present invention relates to a new application of the EC technology and corresponding systems.